Ultima Creator's Next Game: Shroud of the Avatar

Richard Garriott – aka Ultima creator Lord British -- comes across as a bit of a braggart at first. When he arrived at IGN to show his next game, Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar, he started with a history lesson about himself. The expected eye-rolls instead became enthralled interest as Garriott detailed how he got involved in development and what he’s accomplished.

The first boxed version of a video game? Garriott. The idea of collector’s edition-style swag like cloth maps? Garriott. The reason we use the word “avatar” to talk about video game characters, as opposed to its original meaning (which was related to Hinduism)? Yeah, that was him too. Suffice it to say he’s contributed a lot to the language and culture that all of us enjoy, and, well, he’s earned the right to brag a little.

But the boasting Garriott does isn’t merely self-serving, it’s an attempt to make a whole new generation of gamers – many of whom likely aren’t familiar with his popular Ultima franchise – listen when he says he’s making Shroud of the Avatar and wants our help to fund it via Kickstarter. He wants to realize an RPG world that’s grounded in old-school design principles like not spelling out quests and permanent choices but uses online play to create powerful interactions. He wants you to make decisions not based on a visible morality system, but because you’re so engrossed in the world that you’re acting as you would in real life.

Out With the New...

The first modern RPG trope Garriott wants to toss out is the initial class creation. Shroud won’t ask you to read a small description and then pick a class without trying it, but instead allows you to slowly tailor your character to your playstyle. For instance, if you’re hours into the game and want to try alchemy, simply collect ingredients and start making potions to become an alchemist. Want to be something like a traditional ranger? Pick up a bow and fling arrows until it’s mastered. Garriott was quick to state that you won’t be able to become proficient at everything, and that there will be some sort of limited ability to redo your skill investments, but the point is that you try things and see if you love them before committing. This is a bit closer to something like Skyrim, where you make some initial choices about your character but then tailor your abilities overtime by using skills you like.

Likewise, Garriott wants Shroud of the Avatar to challenge you with its quests, not just lay out the solution. A quest giver might tell you to search the mountains to the east to find a clue, but they won’t put a giant blinking spot on your map, and they certainly won’t have a yellow exclamation point over their head. You also won’t have a modern quest log, but instead will have to read a journal that catalogs key events in your character’s story, allowing you to catch up and then decide how to proceed without merely dumping a boring list of objectives on you. For Garriott, quests and logs like this promote thoughtfulness and exploration, something he says is woefully lacking in most RPGs of today.

...In With the Old

The way you explore the world in Shroud of the Avatar won’t surprise Ultima fans. When you’re setting out, you’ll start as a larger scale version of your avatar trekking across the larger world map, like an overworld map in a NES-era JRPG. When you encounter something interesting like a village or cave, you can then enter the area and play through it from an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective, a la Fable or Dragon Age. Garriott hopes to make virtually everything you find in this mode interactive, from pianos you can play to books you can read and more. Granted, that isn’t exactly revolutionary (we’ve all giggled while flushing toilets in Duke Nukem), but Garriott plans to make incorporate interactivity into the way players think about quest design. He compared it to being trapped in a room in real life and first trying the door, only to learn that it’s locked. Next he said he would try to take off the hinges, and if that didn’t work he’d look for a wall he could break. This is the same sort of logic and immersion in the world he wants to achieve with Shroud of the Avatar.

How the overworld map looks as you explore

Dealing Death

Sometimes a sword is more useful than your wits, and Shroud will have plenty of opportunities to fight. While you can arm your avatar with familiar weapons like swords and bows, this is also a world that has electricity, and Garriott wants to include an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, such as an air cannon that could shoot bursts of toxic gas, or a pistol that fires bolts of lightning like a tesla coil.

Just like the rest of Shroud of the Avatar, he wants an underlying logic to define the mechanics of combat. This is why, unlike every other RPG in existence nowadays, you don’t have a set of skills you can actively select. Instead, your character memorizes specific moves they want to potentially use, building a sort of virtual deck of cards. During combat, each move is shuffled and comes up randomly, attempting to simulate the way a person might consider trying a killing blow or overhead slash in the heat of the moment. The more abilities you memorize, the less likely they are to come up in a fight, so there’s also reason to focus.

Choosing Wisely

Whether you decide to fight or think your way out of a solution, Garriott wants choices to matter. That’s a phrase practically every game throws around nowadays, but to Garriott this doesn’t mean tossing in a clear-cut morality meter, but ambiguity. Just like in real life, the bigger-picture way you know whether you’ve done the “right” thing is how people treat you after the fact, and the goal is to make a world where every action you take changes the perceptions of the characters around you. A woman offers you her wedding ring in exchange for food, for instance, and if you refuse it your kindness might be subtly acknowledged by her fellow travelers. Take it? Well, you’d just have to see for yourself. Shroud of the Avatar doesn’t want to tell you that you did the wrong thing, just give you an experience that carries on no matter your choice.

An example of a camp you might find.

The decisions you make won’t always be alone, either. Garriott was quick to emphasize that the entire game can be played offline, but if you connect to the game’s severs he wants it to be meaningful. For starters, this means you can adventure with friends. It also means some sort of player versus player combat, though he insinuated that it will always be part of Shroud of the Avatar’s quest design, rather than something that occurs at random while exploring. And while Shroud is not an MMO (cities will allow larger groups of strangers to see one another, but the larger world is instanced), he wants player interactions and purchasable real estate to shape the world over time.

The version of Garriott’s game being shown is a prototype built in about six months, but it, along with Garriott’s resume, is enough to make me cautiously optimistic. With such incredibly lofty goals it’s hard to imagine that Garriott will accomplish everything he’s setting out to do, but I’ll definitely be checking out the beta later this year and the final version in 2014. We could all use a game that shakes up standard design tropes, and Garriott, with his history of firsts, could be the one to do it.

Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him on @Chufmoney on Twitter and on at Ant-IGN on IGN.